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It has been almost a year since South Korea's spy agency made headlines for manipulating public opinion before the latest presidential election, but shocking revelations have shown that the electoral interference was much more than some maverick spy agents trying to sway public opinion – it was done systematically and on a massive scale.

Recently, the country's prosecutor's office conducted a thorough investigation and found that the scope of election manipulation was much wider and organized than anyone has expected: 1.2 million tweets were sent out by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) to smear opposition leaders, and 23 million tweets [ko] were spread by the Defense Ministry's Cyberwarfare Command to tip the scale in favor of current President Park Geun-hye.

Weekly protests seem to have rekindled, as well as numerous tweets about this unprecedented election interference:

We are now holding a candlelight rally [as of 6 p.m., November 23] with tens of thousands of angry citizens against the systematic electoral interference, broken campaign promises and a clampdown on labor groups.

The number of NIS’s election-related tweets are found to be around 1.1 million – what a colossal amount. If we assume that there are a hundred NIS agents [whose major tasks are leaving comments online], it means one agent took care of 11,000 tweets. If you assume that he or she wrote 50 tweets a day on average, that still takes 220 days to reach that number. If we dont count weekends and holidays, they need a full year to publish this amount of tweets. And it is the evidence that there has been a systemic, organized, and massive efforts to interfere in the election. [*note: More of NIS's tweets have been found as the investigation proceeds, the most recent revelation says that they are about 1.24 million tweets [ko] in total.]

Countless sarcastic comments were made about not only the NIS agents but also the Defense Ministry's Cyberwarfare Command, which is believed to be three times bigger than the NIS’s cyberteam [ko]. It allegedly sent about 20 times more election-related tweets than the spy agency:

No country in the world has pulled off such a systemic and massive manipulation of elections. Please somebody call the Guinness Book of World Records in England and ask them to list us as a country where an unprecedented number of 1.2 million manipulative tweets have been found. If we can also include numbers of comments they [NIS and military Cyberwarfare Command] left on portal sites, we can even break that record.

The prosecutor's office confirmed that NIS wrote 1.24 million of election and politics-related tweets. They’ve found 1.24 million tweets so far! But I believe even that number would be just the tip of the iceberg. What if they had done a more thorough investigation on the portal sites such as Naver and Daum?

Additional revelation came out later [ko] that best-selling authors, academics and even entertainers who vocally criticized the administration have also been a target of attacks by the NIS tweets: